Doesn’t Scare Easily

Reading horror stories pretty inevitably involves the mental operation Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief,” and Lord knows it can be a challenge, even for genre-hardened veterans. The hero of “Best New Horror,” the opening story in Joe Hill’s inventive collection, 20TH CENTURY GHOSTS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.95), is a professional anthologist who has read, by his own count, “almost 10,000 stories of horror and the supernatural” in the course of compiling 16 annual volumes of “America’s Best New Horror,” and his willing-suspension-of-disbelief fatigue has become so acute that he can no longer finish most of the stories that land on his desk. His ennui is almost French in its intensity: “He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul.” I think we’ve all been there.

One day, though, this jaded editor comes across a grisly little item by an unknown writer and finds himself, for the first time in a long while, disbelief-suspending with something like his old, unforced willingness. This story, “Buttonboy,” has, he thinks, “the bread of everyday life” in it, rather than just the usual “rare bleeding meat”; he becomes so dangerously overexcited that he attempts to track down the author. What’s remarkable about “Best New Horror” isn’t that the story is savagely critical of the genre to which it belongs (though Hill’s indictment of conventional horror is nervy stuff for a young writer), nor even that it’s very, very scary, but rather that the narrative unfolds in a way that is consciously, and brazenly, predictable.

The reader will not, in fact, be terribly surprised to learn that the editor’s visit to the home of the mysterious writer proves to be a grievous error. The beauty of the tale is that the horror-weary editor isn’t surprised either, and even takes a peculiar sort of satisfaction in the fulfillment of his direst expectations. “He knew better than anyone how these stories went,” Hill writes, and in that sentence confers on his hero the dignity of a man coming to terms with something not merely predictable but inevitable — a man meeting his destiny stoically, even kind of nobly. Sure, it’s a cheesy, pulp destiny, but it’s as uniquely and irreducibly his as the fates of Borges’s doomed knife-fighters and self-entrapped detectives are theirs. This is a horror fan’s apotheosis.

There are other fine stories in “20th Century Ghosts.” “Pop Art,” “You Will Hear the Locust Sing” and “Voluntary Committal” are all terrific, and the rest are, at a minimum, solid, swift and craftsmanlike. But “Best New Horror” seems to me the most thrillingly original of Hill’s weird tales, a daredevil performance that keeps some complex ideas suspended in the air along with, of course, our usual disbelief. It’s brave and astute of Hill to acknowledge that some part of the appeal of horror fiction — of any genre fiction, really — is its very predictability: the comfort of knowing, at least, what kind of story we’re reading.

This sad truth speaks directly to the vexed question of belief and disbelief because it suggests that for hard-core genre devotees the will to believe is perhaps a touch stronger than it ought to be — that the natural audience for horror consists of readers who are (with apologies to Fats Domino) ready, willing and able to suspend disbelief all night. What happens to that poor editor in “Best New Horror” is instructive: although he thinks that childish credulity has been burned out of him by those thousands of read and half-read stories, he discovers, to his sorrow (and sneaking pleasure), that it’s still there, lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to sucker him one last time.

Joe Hill has clearly given a fair amount of hard thought to the problematics of horror. It’s his destiny, I suppose. He is, as he revealed shortly before the publication of his rambunctiously entertaining first novel, “Heart-Shaped Box,” the son of Stephen and Tabitha King. “20th Century Ghosts” was originally published a couple of years ago in England, before the writer had outed himself as genre royalty, and you can sense in it the urgency of his desire to figure out how horror works, why so much of it is so bad and why, despite everything, it continues to matter to him.

These are questions worth pondering, whether you’re trying to write horror intelligently or simply reading a lot more of the stuff than is good for you. Before I came upon Hill’s work, I’d been feeling discouraged about the current state of the genre, reading (and often abandoning) story after story that failed to persuade, failed to frighten, failed to stimulate whatever don’t-go-there sensation it is we’re looking for when we suspend disbelief, abandon hope and plunge into the dark forest of horror. I turned optimistically to THE IMAGO SEQUENCE (Night Shade, $24.95), the debut collection of the genre’s other Hot Kid, Laird Barron, and found within (there’s no kind way of putting this) nothing but Lovecraft pastiches: stories of the kind that froze the soul of Joe Hill’s hapless anthologist.

Barron’s a more ingenious Lovecraftian than most. He doesn’t merely recycle the master’s elaborate, harebrained “mythos” but adds (usually) his own strange spin to tales of ancient evil bubbling up in the modern world. He sometimes appears to have a hilariously literal take on Lovecraft’s concept of the Old Ones, which customarily refers to a monstrous prehuman race whose survivors live underground in Godforsaken places like Antarctica and New England. In Barron’s stories, these eons-old evildoers tend to manifest themselves in the form of sinister and irritable senior citizens. The problem with all these neo-Lovecraft jobs, though, is that even when they’re as impressively peculiar as Laird Barron’s, they feel secondhand, pointless, helplessly de trop. The mythology Lovecraft cooked up was, God help him, personal and passionate; it carries a whiff of madness. Lacking that authentic, unfakable, belief-compelling insanity, stories like those in “The Imago Sequence” can’t achieve anything much better than nuttiness. And that’s not scary.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Reading Barron, though, I realized that part of the reason his stories leave me cold is that they assume, as too much genre fiction does, a highish level of reader credulity, and I resent it. What kind of reader do you think I am? I’m not easy. There’s a telling passage in MISTER B. GONE (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.95), Clive Barker’s execrable new novel — which is not about the death of George Balanchine but is the first-person narrative of a demon named Jakabok Botch, who surfaced from the underworld around the time Gutenberg was perfecting the printing press. “They want to believe,” Barker/Botch writes. “No, strike that. They don’t simply want to believe it. They need to.” “They” are — generically and apparently without exception — “people,” and “it” is stories like this one, full of “venomous stuff.”

Although Barker has not in recent years come close to matching the brilliant shocks of the stories collected in his “Books of Blood” in the 1980s, many horror readers still approach his work with some degree of anticipation, a hope that he’ll find his macabre touch again. But “Mister B. Gone” uses up the last small pocketful of that good will. The novel is thin, slovenly and grimly unwitty. You can’t escape the melancholy feeling that this is what happens to writers who take our belief for granted.

Joe Hill, refreshingly, does not. And neither does the veteran John Shirley, whose latest book, LIVING SHADOWS (Prime, paper, $14.95), is subtitled “Stories: New and Preowned” because much of it has been previously published: some stories in earlier, out-of-print Shirley collections, others in small-press anthologies and obscure magazines. It’s a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work. In his foreword, Shirley insists that he doesn’t write genre fiction, and although he’s genuinely tough to categorize, all his stories — both the nonsupernatural ones that make up the first half of “Living Shadows” and the more fantastic tales in the second half — give off the chill of top-grade horror. It’s a moral chill, because Shirley’s great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering. The opening line of his novel “Demons” states the theme succinctly: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.” In “The Sewing Room,” one of the new stories in the present collection, an ordinary woman discovers, to her horror, that her husband is a serial murderer, and we discover, to ours, that she can live with it.

Shirley’s dramatis personae tend to be fairly unpleasant folks: killers, petty criminals, drug dealers, end-of-the-line substance abusers, Hollywood sleazeballs. (He writes screenplays as well as fiction.) And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained. The prose is attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. He writes about sensation unsensationally, with a particular tenderness toward those who manage, against the odds and by whatever means, to feel something.

Maybe the best story in this superb collection is a rapt little piece called “Skeeter Junkie,” in which a young heroin addict first begins to enjoy the feeling of the mosquito feeding on his arm, then starts to identify with it and then, as the drugs ooze through his veins, somehow becomes it and finally uses the “exquisite” flying bloodsucker to transport him to the apartment of his comely but standoffish downstairs neighbor. It’s a horror story, I guess, but it’s also funny, weirdly erotic and, in a way that horror almost never is, tragic.

In the title of Shirley’s collection, there’s a faint, happy echo of the passage from “Biographia Literaria” in which Coleridge coined his famous phrase. Speaking of his contributions to the seminal 1798 volume “Lyrical Ballads,” which included “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the poet wrote: “My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” That’s exactly what good horror writers like Joe Hill and John Shirley do with the shadows of their imagination. And there’s an explanation here, too, of the hope that can keep even the most skeptical, fed-up reader coming back to horror fiction. Watching vampires having sex may not strike you as an adequate reward for suspending disbelief. But the poetry of fear and mortality is worth all the belief you can muster.